(NAFB.com) – The National Pork Board recently organized a foreign animal disease exercise to practice and troubleshoot a simulated response to a mock disease outbreak.

Over 40 people from academia, production, the USDA, the veterinarian community, and the Iowa Pork Producers Association teamed up during the all-day event. The staff at the Swine Medicine Education Center at Iowa State University hosted the event. “The value of this exercise is the continuous practice as regulation, technology, and stakeholder awareness evolve,” says Dr. Tyler Bauman, a herd veterinarian for The Maschhoffs, LLC. “The more we prepare, the quicker we can respond to an actual incident.”

Participants practiced every procedure in the coordinated response plan based on location and the outbreak’s status to identify, understand, and address their knowledge gaps. “There were real-time insights from the High Path Avian Influenza outbreak that state veterinarians could share,” Bauman adds. “Each stakeholder at the drill shared a wealth of knowledge in their roles.”